How do you achieve effective programming ?

[Tim Wirtz]

One of my interests since I was little was movies and the projecting of them. The last few years my interest has ramped up again and I have been reading everything in the forums that let me. When we went to the show when I was a kid, there was still some theatricality left with the dimming of the lights and the curtains parting. But it was extremely rare to have additional shorts to be shown.
Lately I've been having the notion to put on shows. I have a lot of shorts, but not many features. I know there are people here that were running a booth during the golden age of cinema. Was there a set order for how the different shorts were shown ? Or could you shape the flow of a program to set a mood for what type of feature was playing that week. For instance if it was a serious or lighthearted subject, what program would best build to that point. I'm still new to posting, I apologize if this isn't too coherent.

[Ed Gordon]

1. Policy trailers (No smoking, turn off your cell phone, etc...)
2. Coming attractions trailers
3. Short subjects
4. Feature presentation

[Chip Gelmini]

Good advice Ed.
I prefer to do shorts before trailers but that's just me.

I also make sure this segment before feature is NO LONGER THAN 20 minutes

(when people complain today at the theater there's too many trailers and they're so damn loud well cut it in half and turn it down)

[Ed Gordon]

Chip, I agree with your comments on trailers; about three is my limit.

If you are showing an old classic like Casablanca, it can be fun to build the show around it. Show trailers from the 1940's, For a cartoon, run Bugs Bunny in Carrotblanca. Top it off with a newsreel from the 1940's.

[Graham Ritchie]

At home I used to put on a short before a feature, but these days I tend to just go straight into the feature. Putting a program together is a great idea but my advice is to keep it short especially if the following feature is two hours or over long.

[Chip Gelmini]

Ed is so right.

last night I played my S8 full length print of ET I started the show with A GRAND DAY OUT. So this time it was longer than 20 minutes but yet a perfect combination.

Programming is really fun especially when you nail it. Don't forget clean gates, soundheads, good lamps, dimming lights.

PROGRAMMING: It's part of SHOWMANSHIP.

[Ed Gordon]

my advice is to keep it short especially if the following feature is two hours or over long

Is it just me, or have features gotten too long? When movies came on film, the length of the movie affected the overall cost. Now that most movies are digital, there is little incentive to be conservative on running lengths.

[Tim Wirtz]

Thank you, that's along the lines what I was looking for. I agree, movies are longer then they need to be now. Most of the vintage ones were only a little more then an hour.
I realized later that you probably could only show the shorts they sent you at a given time & may not have had the luxury of selecting a program. I was partially wondering if the types of subject matter are more appropriate of a particular genre of film or does it not matter ?

[Chip Gelmini]

I have also pulled this one off. Enlarge the photo to read the article. One of the earlier (after year 2000) Derann Film For The Collector issues. It was the intermission reel between two features. Bambi was shown first - followed by Spielberg's Jurassic Park (original). Everything in the middle got quite the attention.....LOL

[Ed Gordon]

Every matinee began with a black and white newsreel. Nobody watched or listened to it, so its 15 minutes duration enabled us to yell out greetings to friends and acquaintances not in our immediate area. Next came a cartoon. Felix the Cat would be greeted with boos. So would Mighty Mouse. An opera-singing super mouse…gimme a break! Heckle & Jeckle were only so-so. So, too, were Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd. Sylvester & Tweety-Pie were cool; Bugs Bunny was even better, but the roar that went up when Tom & Jerry or Daffy Duck appeared on the screen was thunderous! They were tops. We loved the violence in Tom & Jerry toons. Of course, it was only a matter of time before that anonymous legion of ‘goody-two-shoes’ wielded its outrageous power and forced the makers to remove all signs of violence. Party-poopers! Daffy was my hero. He was cowardly, selfish and stupid. My kind of guy. Oddly, perhaps, I don’t ever recall seeing a Disney cartoon at a Saturday matinee. No Mickey Mouse nor Donald Duck. Not ever. If you wanted to see them you had to attend a major feature, more often than not a Disney movie. No big deal. Bugs and T& J and Daffy were much funnier anyway.

Full article at: https://filmstarfacts.com/2019/02/22...atinees-1950s/

[Paul Adsett]

Well, when I was growing up in the UK, the standard sequence for a full show at my local cinema, in order of presentation were:

Wurlitzer/Compton Organ playing popular songs of the period - about 15 mins
Pathe or British Movietone News - 10 minute newsreel with new edition twice a week
A single trailer of upcoming attractions - the next feature film to be shown at the cinema after the current one.
A "B" Picture, usually about 70 mins, typically a film noir or western.
Feature film
God Save The King/Queen

Not bad for 0ne and sixpence - You really got your moneys worth in those days!

[Brian Fretwell]

When I was young it was still "Continuous programme" you could turn upp and enter at any time so the order was never set, especially if you turned up half way through the "B" film of a double feature and stayed around to see how it started!!!

[Ken Finch]

As an old codger my childhood memories of programming are as Paul and Brian’s. I would add though that the main features were seldom more than an hour and a half long and the B film about an hour. There were few exceptions e,g. Gone With theWind. In this case the programme was limited to next weeks trailer and the newsreel. Unfortunately, because of the length of modern films all you get these days are about 10 minutes of trailers and about 30 minutes of the dreaded Pearl and Dean advertisements. My home cinema is a nod to the old ABC circuit and depending on the length of the main film try to programme like the old days. Thanks to Pathescope, I can sometimes even show a Newsreel! I can also use ABC day sets for the trailers as many of these were available from Keith Wilton. Nostalgia rules o.k.! I suppose I should explain that my shows can consist of a number of formats. Ken Finch.😊

[Ed Gordon]

... I suppose I should explain that my shows can consist of a number of formats. Ken Finch.😊

Ken, what formats do you use for your shows?

[Steve Lee]

I think it boils down to the demographic of the audience and also if it is seasonal.
About fifteen years ago I decided to do a Christmas Boxing day film show in my village, as there were so many young children in the village at this time.
I approached our mayor and asked if it was possible to use the village hall for the event, in which he handed me the keys and told me it was all mine.
I printed out some flyers and posted them around the village.
The next problem was what to show? knowing this would have to appeal to a totally french audience.

I dug out my copy of "The Red Balloon" which at this time still had plenty of colour in it, sadly now it is definitely is the red balloon, I added a couple of Tom and Jerry's and re recorded my copy of Disney's Aladdin into french.
To my surprise the entire village showed up, all 350 of them! The mayor and his wife supplied drinks and popcorn and a good time was had by all.

This must had left a lasting impression for them. All of the children now are teenagers and into their twenties, and still talk about this to me even after all of these years.

But thinking back to my cinema days, you would never know, week by week the running time of your advert reels, until that friday morning when you opened the film can. You would then have to decide what went into the supporting program on the spot.
The big problem came when you had the big summer "Blockbuster" in the days when these were blockbuster's. I remember opening the can of ads for the first week of Jurassic Park, and to my horror finding a full 2000' can of adverts, as every ad campaign wanted to get on the bandwagon. By the time you had added a couple of trailers, this brought the running time of the supporting program to about thirty minutes.

As we were contracted to show the film four times a day, this meant the supporting program had to start as soon as the end credits had finished. It seemed pointless closing the tabs.
Fortunately we had a pair of projectors so it was possible to do so. I could have never imagined having to do a change over on the end credits, over to the ad reel, but needs be.
I think the front of house team gave up in the end trying to clean the auditorium between screenings, as there was no point.